I started at the Ventura County Star selling ads. Then leadership found out I’d gone to USC film school and decided to do something with it. I ended up building a little video business inside the newspaper.

We packaged it into three tiers. The simple ones were cut together from b-roll and voiceover. The bigger ones were full multi-interview stories. We sold them to local businesses for their own websites. I’d sell them myself, or ride along with the ad reps, then go out and do the whole thing. I’d sit with the business, find the story, shoot the interviews, gather the b-roll, and edit it together. Looking back, it was content marketing before anyone around me was using that phrase.

It produced a stretch of work I still think about. A gymnastics studio. An auto detailer. A jeweler. A solar company. A charter school. Dozens of local businesses.

One of them, George Thompson Diamond Co., started with a handful of testimonial videos and turned into something much bigger. George flew me to Bangkok to tour his factory, and the footage I shot there ended up running in his television commercials for years. Every once in a while, I’d be watching Monday Night Football and catch one of my own shots on TV. We stayed close until he passed.

Looking back, I wasn’t just making videos. I was selling the work, producing it, managing the relationships, and growing the business one client at a time.